Like him or not, Fergie won’t be forgotten
The morning Alex Ferguson’s retirement was confirmed, we switched onto Sky Sports and three of the first four contributors were players that had fallen out with him, triggering their own departure from Old Trafford: Paul Ince, David Beckham and Dwight Yorke.
And what struck us was that all three spoke glowingly of him, with Ince talking of how he’s found Ferguson a real mentor during his own managerial career.
That says something remarkable about Ferguson. Over the last week there have been many all-time Fergie XI’s selected, but we came up with another Fergie selection that tells a tale: Jim Leighton; David Beckham, Paul McGrath, Jaap Stam, Lee Sharpe; Gordon Strachan, Roy Keane, Paul Ince, Andrei Kanchelskis; Carlos Tevez, Ruud van Nistelrooy, with Wayne Rooney this time making it to the bench, alongside Norman Whiteside and Yorke. All at various stages were big players for Ferguson before they were decisively shown the door.
Strachan and Leighton were among the pillars of his Aberdeen revolution; Sharpe, the spark of the ’91 Cup Winners Cup team; Ince and Kanchelskis, United’s two-best players in the Cantona-less and trophy-less season of ’94-’95 just before they got the door; van Nistelrooy, the most prolific scorer of the Ferguson era; Tevez and Rooney, huge players that along with Cristiano Ronaldo stepped up to more than compensate for the goals given up when van Nistelrooy left.
Nearly all have patched up their relationship with Ferguson. Ten years after Fergie summarily told him at a petrol station that he was being sold to Lazio, Stam happily attended a dinner to celebrate 25 years of Ferguson at Old Trafford. Last November his fellow Dutchman van Nistelrooy attended the unveiling of the Ferguson statute outside that ground, making peace with his old manager.
Leighton would hardly be on such convivial terms with Ferguson after his 1990 Cup final replay demotion. But he’s no longer bitter. Maybe some of it has to do with the fact that the man who replaced him, Les Sealey, is no longer with us, dying of a heart attack at just 43. Most of it has to do with realising all they’d done and shared together.
“I will be grateful for the big part Alex played in my career,” Leighton said in a recent interview. “I can’t speak about my career and not mention him because he helped me to achieve some marvellous things.”
Keane is getting there, though it may take the full 10 years after his acrimonious 2005 exit for him to be as accepting and at such peace as the likes of Ince, Ruud and Beckham are about the gaffer now. Tevez literally isn’t in a place to do that yet. As for Rooney? Who knows? All we know and like is that even in his last home game Fergie was coaching and managing right to the end, his omission of Rooney echoing his omission of Ruud towards the end of 2006.
It’s hard to believe that he won’t be around anymore. Of course he was going to retire someday but then we’re all going to die someday too; it doesn’t mean it won’t come as a shock. It was commented at the weekend that he defined more than British football over the last quarter of century but defined part of British life. It’s true. Even for those of us over here, that weren’t United fans or ABUs either, he was a constant reference point.
I remember the night before sitting — and dreading — my first year college exams in economics because it was the night Lee Martin scored the goal that won the FA Cup. The time our family first bought Sky because it was the weekend we watched Cantona make his debut and United beat City 2-1.
My last exam as a journalist student because the following day I watched the 1995 FA Cup final and went for pints with my classmate and Man U fan Conor Pope — yep, he was tight with his money even then. Every time I hear Oasis’s Don’t Look Back in Anger I think of watching the climax of the 1996 league with my Man U fanatic of a brother on holiday in the Canaries, amid all the taunts that just love it-love it ‘Keegan can wait, he knows it’s too late...’ I remember when United won the 2004 FA Cup because it was on the hotel reception TV the day my fiancée and I were looking at a venue for our wedding. I remember when Paul Scholes scored a crucial goal against Blackburn in the league in 2007 because I was in the coffee shop of a maternity hospital after the birth of our daughter.
Fergie was like his beloved Sinatra, a soundtrack, backdrop to our lives.
So in a way you can see why all those old ex-pros have come round to feeling quite fuzzy about him. Like him or not, he’s what memories are made of.
